Forensic Context

A study in humans demonstrated that the miR-144-5p displayed similar expression patterns to blood markers, with slightly higher expression in venous blood compared to menstrual blood, but did not add information beyond other blood markers for body fluid identification [Sauer et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2016.01.018]. In a separate clinical investigation, the miR-144-5p was significantly downregulated in the plasma of patients with acute spinal cord injury (SCI) at emergency room admission compared to healthy controls, and showed a trend toward stronger suppression in SCI compared to polytrauma patients without neurotrauma [Hörauf et al. DOI:10.3390/ijms262210954]. A study in humans demonstrated that the miR-144-5p is a candidate miRNA biomarker for menstrual blood identification, used in a logistic regression model that achieved 100% correct classification in a test set [Hanson et al. DOI:10.1002/elps.201400171]. Another human study identified the miR-144-5p as a body fluid-specific marker for peripheral blood and menstrual blood, showing the highest and most distinguishable expression levels in these fluids compared to non-blood samples, and it was selected as one of 12 key features for a multi-class support vector machine model that achieved 98% accuracy on an independent test set [Li et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2024.103180].